The idea that a LiveCD, which works fine on the genuine hardware, won't boot inside a proprietary VM application.. suggests to me that the VM app has a bug or ten.

Now if it were something more mainstream, mature, and third/neutral-party, like VMware failing here, then yeah, I'd agree: bad LiveCD.

Kinda like the issue I was having (until throwing in the towel) trying to get a working XP install to boot inside VMware. You'd really think they'd test that kind of scenario.

That said -- the Ubuntu LiveCDs often do choose peculiar video modes for startup, in an attempt to be font-friendly to the planet. Rather than making language-specific LiveCDs for each of the dozens of supported languages/charsets.

-ml